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Licences Explained

As a response to the growing need for an alternative to copyright in the United States, Creative Commons, led by Internet legal guru, Lawrence Lessig, was launched in 2001. The first project of Creative Commons was the development of a set of user-friendly licences which would enable creators to share their work under certain conditions. By tagging works as free to copy and share, Creative Commons also established a means for artists to draw inspiration from a fast-growing repository of free culture.

Creative Commons licences fall into different licence categories according to the following conditions:

  1. Attribution: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give you credit.
  2. Noncommercial: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.
  3. No Derivative works: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
  4. Share alike: You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

Creative Commons has been extremely successful in its attempts to develop an alternative to the default copyright licence assumed on all written or multimedia Internet content. Its success lies in the user-friendly nature of the licences which applies to three types of code - legal, human-readable and machine-readable code. A user clicking on the Creative Commons icon on the creator's work gets the “Commons Deed” — a human readable version of the licence. From that she can link to the “Legal Code” — the actual licence that the creator has offered their content under. The metadata is the “Machine-Readable Code” that enables others to find content listed under Creative Commons licences.

Users should include a Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" button on your site, near the licensed work. Help and tips on doing this are covered here. This button will link back to the Commons Deed, so that the world can be notified of the licence terms. If you find that your licence is being violated, you may have grounds to sue under copyright infringement.

Since Creative Commons first launched their licences in 2001, the organisation has grown beyond its originators' wildest dreams with millions of works now listed as free for others to build on and share. When people from other countries recognised the potential of the licences, they approached Creative Commons, resulting in the formation of the iCommons strategy which allows for the 'porting' or re-writing of licences to suit a particular country's law.

To find out more about how the licences work, go to http://creativecommons.org.